I'm not a programmer, I'm a linguist, but I've learned a few things over the years about the web. My goal: Set up a searchable dictionary of natural languages (mostly East Asian, Central Asian, European languages and dialects) for academic research purposes. UTF-8 functionality is a must because data is in IPA (squiggly pronunciation characters) and local language characters. I would like the user to be able to choose the output in traditional or simplified characters, IPA, English, or any other fields in the database. For those who program in PHP, I'm sure this is not a big deal: (all pages on the site are always saved as UTF-8, so input/output is constant) 1. SEARCH the database for a match 2. OUTPUT all possible matches (limit to x# per page) with the proper encodings so characters display 3. Follow links to browse content Of course doing all of this set in my web template. These kinds of dictionaries exist all over the web, but I need a script that searches and can generate interlinked pages for each entry. My dictionaries are unique because nobody has ever done them before with words and phrases for these languages, and there are about 800,000 lines of data. I have already set up a database and actually had a database designer working on scripts, but he had no idea what to do because it wasn't displaying correctly. Encodings and collation in the database are all set to UTF-8, but according to the designer's recommendation I deleted and re-installed putting it back to latin1_swedish_ci which is how it is now. Still no luck. All non-Latin become ??. But the same is true when everything is set to UTF-8. WTF? I think there's something wrong with the script and I don't like the script he came up with. For example, if I type "a" it searches and outputs every occurrence of "a" from the database, and it shouldn't do that, it should search for whole word matches, otherwise there's a gazillion matches. He said that's ok. I hate to argue with the programmer, however, that is just a *bad* idea for a dictionary and won't meet the needs of the users. The user should have the choice to search any of the fields, English or whatever, another thing he was unable to come up with. The Chinese character dictionary search at chineselanguage dot org is actually quite nice and something I would like to replicate if possible. Thanks anybody who can help.